1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a driving situation detection system for detecting and assessing undesirable driving situations in general driving operation. In particular, the present invention relates to a technique for detecting driving situations swiftly with high reliability.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, order to detect undesirable driving situations, the deviation of the real driving behavior from a linear reference driving behavior is assessed.
Since the majority of vehicle drivers rarely leaves the linear range, if the vehicle behavior becomes nonlinear, the driver of the vehicle has a problem of controlling the vehicle (the driving situation is undesirable).
Usually, a linear reference model of the vehicle is executed to cover the field of experience of the majority of drivers. In this case, the yaw velocity generated by the reference model is compared to the real, measured yaw velocity. Based on the deviation between the two yaw velocities the driving situation is assessed (see EP 1 000 838 A2 and DE 198 51 978 A1, for example).
A system using the vehicle body side slip angle is proposed as an approach other than the driving behavior assessing means (See DE 100 39 782 A1, for example).
In conventional driving situation detection systems, detection of driving situations is carried out simply by assessing the deviation of the real driving behavior from a reference driving behavior. Therefore, detection results cannot be obtained swiftly with sufficiently high reliability.